Behind the Times (14 page)

Arthur Sulzberger’s bantering humor was deceptive: He always knew what was expected of him, on whatever floor he worked. Ten years after Sulzberger’s Washington tour, in the early winter of 1988, Ben
Franklin, a
Times
man since 1959 and at sixty-one one of the older members of the Washington bureau, was being forced into early retirement. Officially, Franklin was informed that his retirement was part of an economy drive. Franklin went up to New York, as he puts it, to get “embalmed”—that is, complete the details of his severance package, including the terms of his pension and health-care benefits. He remembered dreading the walk through the third-floor newsroom. On impulse, Franklin decided to go up to the executive floor and unburden himself to Arthur Sulzberger, his old fellow bureauman, at the time the newly appointed assistant publisher of the
Times.

Franklin found no Prince Hal. Sulzberger was very much part of the management loop; far from being ignorant of Franklin’s situation, the assistant publisher had signed off on the economy drive. He looked
Franklin in the eye and told him that the bureau was bloated; costs had to be cut and a message sent to the whole staff. “The paper must have the right to put people where they are needed and away from where they’re not needed.” Franklin closed out his
Times
career feeling anger and bitterness. He had given his best years to the paper; now “the bean counters had taken over, to team up with the careerists, who were always there.” Franklin eventually found work he could enjoy at
Nucleonics
, a McGraw-Hill company magazine. Franklin held on to his shares of Times stock, and complained when it stalled in the low twenties through the early years of the 1990s. The economy drive that cost him his job had not helped the stock price.

The title “assistant publisher” had been created for Arthur. His apprenticeship seemed to stretch on and on through the 1980s. His father held on to the two titles of publisher of the
Times
and chairman-CEO of the Times Company. Careful readers could spot signs of the newsroom’s sly “Arthur watch” in the pages of the paper. A short news story in the
Times
of February 18, 1989, noted that England’s Prince Charles was visiting Washington, D. C. The forty-year-old heir to the British throne dined with some noble Americans his own age, including Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., by then deputy publisher of the
Times
, and Donald Graham, the publisher of the
Washington Post.
Donald Graham’s mother, Katharine Graham, then seventy-two, still held the title of chairman of the parent Washington Post Company. The story said Prince Charles talked with his dinner companions about the travails of being a king in waiting, and having “to invent one’s job as one went along.”

The
Times’
publisher in waiting took on a select few social obligations as he marked time in the company hierarchy. He became interested in the Outward Bound program and eventually became one of its trustees. The Outward Bound “experience” is a kind of sleepaway camp for adults. Participants are usually thirtysomething men on the way up the corporate or public ladder. They undertake rugged outdoor challenges, such as mountain climbing, rafting, or wilderness backpacking, in order to learn the arts of cooperation, self-reliance, male bonding, and survival away from the boardroom. Normally, the younger Sulzberger got his exercise, and the experience of urban survival, in morning jogs through Central Park across from the West Side apartment he and Gail Gregg shared with their two young children. Some non-
Times
people tried to hang the name Pinch on him, as much to play off the family succession as to signify the son’s slim
runner’s build. It wouldn’t stick: “You can
call me that, once,” he informed an acquaintance, with barely a smile breaking across his broad, pleasant features.

The son was no knockoff version of the father. Quite the contrary, the younger Sulzberger was in some ways in competition with the senior Sulzberger. The family had agreed to the passing of authority: Arthur’s status was not in doubt. Although he had older sisters, no woman was seriously considered a candidate to run the paper (in that respect nothing had changed from 1963 to 1991). True, there were the male children of Punch’s three older sisters, and, as it happened, three cousins of Arthur Sulzberger were also working their way up the Times Company hierarchy at the same time: Michael and Stephen Golden, the sons of Ruth Sulzberger Holmberg, and Daniel Cohen, the son of Dr. Judith Sulzberger (who had resumed the use of her maiden name). The newsroom noted Michael Golden’s promotion to the job of publisher of
McCall’s
, part of the Times Magazine Group; it observed Daniel Cohen’s progress in the
Times’
advertising department. Cohen went through Tufts together with Arthur Sulzberger and they were friends as well as cousins and colleagues. A knowledge of
Times
history added to the pleasures of Sulzberger family-watching. In 1919 two other family members had been put on parallel tracks to the top. They were Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Iphigene’s husband, and Julius Ochs Adler, the son of Adolph Ochs’s sister Ada. Both men had joined the paper after being mustered out of the army. Ochs assigned his son-in-law Sulzberger to duties primarily on the editorial side of the
Times
; Adler was given duties on the business side. Ochs also gave each man—and Iphigene—a single vote to select the successor on his death. As long as Iphigene was happily married to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, Gay Talese wrote in his history of the
Times
, “the
odds would be with Sulzberger 2 to 1.”

There was no suggestion of a vote this time. The only real family rivalry seemed to be between the two Arthurs. The date of Prince Charles’s ascension to the British throne depended solely on the longevity of his mother, the queen. Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., had to wait on the intentions of his father. The son had to consider, for example, whether his father really intended to give himself over full-time to the activities of ceremonial elder of the New York social establishment. The elder Sulzberger’s term as head of the publishers’ association had expired in 1989, although he stayed on the committee of the leading publisher-owners charged with lobbying the Congress for stricter regulation
of the telephone companies and their plans to get into the data-transmission business. Electronic information services could rob newspapers of the classified advertising so essential to their continued existence.

Punch Sulzberger’s duties at the Met also took up work time each week. Refreshingly, he stayed outside the showy orbit of “the new collectors” who bought art the way they acquired Southhampton houses or trophy wives. He had joined the Met’s board in 1968 as much because of a prudent businessman’s belief that the
Times
should be involved in the culture of the city as from any abiding interest in the museum’s holdings. He had no collection of his own to speak of at the time, and did not accumulate any major artworks in the years since, although he did like to buy antique maps, mainly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cartographers’ conceptions of the North American continent. He hung them on the paneled wall of the fourteenth-floor reception room outside his office. His favorite depicted the northeast U.S. coast, with illustrations along the margins of beavers at work, building dams. The European cartographer had never encountered beavers before, Sulzberger explained to a visitor, and had to imagine how the beavers built their dams across streams. The engraving shows the beavers walking upright, carrying stones and other materials on their broad tails. A parable of the
Times’
newsroom, perhaps? “Oh yes, though here they carry the stones on their heads,” Sulzberger replied.

At the Met, he had felt most comfortable serving on the museum’s arms and armor committee: The military hardware appealed to the gadgeteer in him. But there were certain other intangibles. His wife, Carol Sulzberger, a lively, gregarious woman, enjoyed the New York social scene. She had sources and telephone mates—friends would be too strong a word—among the
Times’
women reporters who covered the worlds of couture and society, thirty-year veterans like Enid Nemy. Carol Sulzberger particularly relished the stage-center role occupied by the wife of the publisher of the
Times.
Both Sulzbergers understood that he was tapped as chairman of the board not because of his tastes in art, or because he lived in the neighborhood. While the Met directors serve on one of the two or three most socially prestigious boards in America, they know their true role is simple, even banal: Donate one’s own money for the Museum building funds and acquisitions programs, or prevail upon friends and acquaintances to donate their money. “
Give it, or get it,” one board member summed up for me. It didn’t hurt that the museum had a friend at the
Times
, although
Sulzberger characteristically framed the relationship in terms of the
Times
reviewers’ authority to write critically about the Met’s exhibits, rather than his power over their notices. “I sit here and cross my fingers every time a show opens,” he says. “You know, it’s difficult for me to say,
‘Charlie, give me a couple of million dollars for a show,’ and then to see it kicked in the head by the
Times.
”

The arts critics at the
Times
did not treat the Met’s shows as harshly as Sulzberger suggests. On the contrary, he was a great success as chairman. Between 1987 and 1990, in the first three years of his tenure, $125 million in contributions flowed in from other owners of the Republic. Under Sulzberger, too, foreign capitalists were afforded the opportunity to meet the publisher of the
Times
, and support the good works of the museum. He was part of a museum delegation to Japan; there, in his words, he had to “gently rattle the tin cup” for contributions from Tokyo industrialists and business leaders—the noble owners of Japan (and the heads of companies that the
Times
covered in its business-news pages).

Yet these missions to Japan appeared more dignified than his greeter’s role at the corporate receptions and private parties held at the museum. In the 1980s, the Met board permitted companies that donated $30,000 or more in any calendar year to rent space in the museum’s Temple of Dendur and Great Hall, for black-tie dinners and cocktail receptions. Individual nouveaux riches were also allowed to hold affairs at the Met, usually under the same terms that applied to companies. The Texas financier Sid Bass and his bride-to-be, Mercedes Kellogg, held their pre-wedding party in the Charles Engelhard Court; Bloomingdale’s chairman, Marvin Traub, was the host of a reception for Robert Campeau (before Campeau’s highly leveraged Federated Department Stores tottered into bankruptcy); the LBO king Henry Kravis, and his fashion designer wife, Carolyne Roehm, held a sit-down dinner for 140. All of these affairs were eclipsed when the daughter of the greenmail specialist Saul Steinberg married a son of the Tisch family (CBS, Loews). The Steinberg-Tisch wedding reception at the Met, according to the gossip columns in the
Times’
tabloid competitors, cost $3 million, a sum that included a $17,000 cake and floral arrangements consisting of fifty thousand French roses and gold-dipped magnolia leaves. Club Met, the tab columnists took to calling the museum during Sulzberger’s tenure.

Sulzberger had reasoned that because the building at night was “going to be dark anyway,” and because companies were willing to pay
handsomely for the privilege of having their parties at the Met,
“Why not open it up?” It had been a businessman’s matter-of-fact assessment. But Sulzberger didn’t need all the sniping about New York’s “rent-a-palace” and its “parvenue party venue.” There were other, more rewarding, ways to spend one’s energies. And so the early 1990s at the
Times
became something of a replay of the early 1980s: Punch Sulzberger was no more willing to surrender his
Times
power and glory than Abe Rosenthal had been. Sulzberger didn’t really want to spend his settled days making small talk with Brooke Astor at the Fashion Designers of America awards dinner.

Punch Sulzberger had carried out his patriarchal role well. Family fears about loss of control of the
Times
had at last been exorcised. No one had to grow sick with worry about creditors, or other outsiders, wresting away the newspaper. The Sulzbergers, father and son, however, needed all their resiliency to deal with the onset of a fresh set of anxieties about the
Times.
It was no longer sufficient that Punch Sulzberger had preserved the dynastic ownership. The future shape of the
Times
as a journalistic enterprise had to be determined as well. The
Times
he had taken over in 1963 went about its business recording the official news of the day—from Europe, Washington, City Hall, the financial markets—for a serious-minded readership composed, in the main, of the business and professional classes in New York. These readers knew what to expect: the old, gray—but good—
New York Times.
The
Times
he was turning over to his son no longer considered itself the newspaper of record. It actively avoided that title. “
The record is boring for most people,” Warren Hoge declared. “We don’t record the news, we find the news.” The modern
Times
sought a national audience; it aimed to be friendly to a new audience that—the market research claimed—was uninterested in traditional newspapers.

The research said that this new generation had to be lured into the habit of reading a daily paper, and no one was a more avid disciple of the new thinking than Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr.

As the younger Sulzberger exerted his influence, the concerns about being attractive to younger readers began to make the
Times
sound like a stuck whistle. In the Sunday edition of January 6, 1991, the
Times
ran three separate articles about the “decline of reading.” The lead article in the business section, by Alex Jones, filled most of the first page and another page inside. It carried the headline “Rethinking Newspapers,” and referred in its subhead to “a nagging long-term problem: Fewer people are reading newspapers.” An accompanying
one-column graphic, with the head “Fewer Readers,” depicted the number of U.S. households (an upward curve) and the total daily circulation of U.S. newspapers (a flat line). Deeper in the Business section that same Sunday, the “Forum” feature offered “The Upheavals in the Media,” by a guest expert, Professor Jib Fowles of the University of Houston. According to Fowles, the nation’s “baby boomers”—more obsessive concern with the under-forty generation—were “hitting their stride in their careers and at home … [and] simply have less time to devote to reading.…” Finally in
Education Life
, a quarterly supplement of the
Times
, staff reporter Roger Cohen described “aliterate” Americans: people who know how to read but don’t. Cohen wrote of a University of Pennsylvania graduate who “sees nothing strange in not reading because ‘half my friends don’t read either.’ With television, sports, and movies occupying his leisure time, he says reading ‘just never interested me that much.’ ”